Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking

http://www.prometheusbooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1692

Thomas Kida (Amherst, MA) is a professor in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of many articles on decision-making.

Do you believe that you can consistently beat the stock market if you put in the effort? —that some people have extrasensory perception? —that crime and drug abuse in America are on the rise? Many people hold one or more of these beliefs although research shows that they are not true. And it’s no wonder since advertising and some among the media promote these and many more questionable notions.
Although our creative problem-solving capacity is what has made humans the successful species we are, our brains are prone to certain kinds of errors that only careful critical thinking can correct. This enlightening book discusses how to recognize faulty thinking and develop the necessary skills to become a more effective problem solver.
Author Thomas Kida identifies “the six-pack of problems” that leads many of us unconsciously to accept false ideas:

• We prefer stories to statistics
• We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas.
• We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events.
• We sometimes misperceive the world around us.
• We tend to oversimplify our thinking.
• Our memories are often inaccurate.

Kida vividly illustrates these tendencies with numerous examples that demonstrate how easily we can be fooled into believing something that isn’t true.
In a complex society where success—in all facets of life—often requires the ability to evaluate the validity of many conflicting claims, the critical-thinking skills examined in this informative and engaging book will prove invaluable.

World Population Growth Infographic

http://www.upack.com/press/population-growth/ 

Just how much is the world's population expected to grow over the next 40 years? Here's a look at how the massive population growth over the past 60 years has impacted the world we live in and what to expect as the world population continues to grow.
Originally seen on: http://pimentanegra.blogspot.com/

"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer."
- Walden - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

TAX HAVENS: How Globalization Really Works

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=5576

From the Cayman Islands and the Isle of Man to the Principality of Liechtenstein and the state of Delaware, tax havens offer lower tax rates, less stringent regulations and enforcement, and promises of strict secrecy to individuals and corporations alike. In recent years government regulators, hoping to remedy economic crisis by diverting capital from hidden channels back into taxable view, have undertaken sustained and serious efforts to force tax havens into compliance.

In Tax Havens, Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux provide an up-to-date evaluation of the role and function of tax havens in the global financial system-their history, inner workings, impact, extent, and enforcement. They make clear that while, individually, tax havens may appear insignificant, together they have a major impact on the global economy. Holding up to $13 trillion of personal wealth—the equivalent of the annual U.S. Gross National Product—and serving as the legal home of two million corporate entities and half of all international lending banks, tax havens also skew the distribution of globalization's costs and benefits to the detriment of developing economies.

The first comprehensive account of these entities, this book challenges much of the conventional wisdom about tax havens. The authors reveal that, rather than operating at the margins of the world economy, tax havens are integral to it. More than simple conduits for tax avoidance and evasion, tax havens actually belong to the broad world of finance, to the business of managing the monetary resources of individuals, organizations, and countries. They have become among the most powerful instruments of globalization, one of the principal causes of global financial instability, and one of the large political issues of our times.

Authors:
Ronen Palan is Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires, also from Cornell.
Richard Murphy is CEO of Tax Research, LLP, based in the UK. He is a frequent adviser to the media, NGOs, and politicians, and writes a blog at taxresearch.org.uk.
Christian Chavagneux, based in Paris, is deputy editor in chief of Alternatives Economiques and editor of L'Economie politique.

"Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist."
- Garth Jowett

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disasters

"The freshest, deepest, most optimistic account of human nature I've come across in years."
-Bill McKibben

Rebecca Solnit - Author 

The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become-one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of numerous books, including Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received the prestigious Lannan Literary Award.

The Evolution of Cooperation

Insects that survive on plant sap alone offer insights into the likely origin and evolution of all multicellular life

Source: http://seedmagazine.com/

Credit: Flickr user Michael Hodge

Suppose you were imprisoned in a room with no food supply except for a huge trough of maple syrup. How long do you think you could survive? Sure, the syrup would provide plenty of energy for basic bodily functions, but it would perhaps be only a few months until scurvy or other nasty diseases of malnutrition ravaged your body. Without the ability to somehow produce vitamins and amino acids necessary for survival, consuming a food composed of just sugar and a few minerals likely wouldn’t sustain you for even a year.

Yet many animals do survive on very limited diets, and they have no more ability than you do to produce the basic building blocks of life. Last week, microbiology researcher Ryan Kitko pointed out that the candy-stripe leafhopper thrives while consuming only the xylem and phloem of plants—sap. So how do sap-sucking insects like leafhoppers and aphids survive? Kitko points to two studies on a type of leafhopper commonly known as sharpshooters. Researchers found cells in sharpshooters that were jam-packed with bacteria, which converted the raw materials from sap into the vitamins and amino acids the insects need to survive.

The glassy-winged sharpshooter has two different resident bacteria, each of which creates different nutrients for the host insect from its base diet of plant sap. The bacteria are transmitted directly from the mother to her eggs, so young insects hatch with all the apparatus they need to live on plant sap alone. The bacteria, in turn, have very limited genomes. They wouldn’t be able to survive without the host insects to provide protection and a ready supply of food. In fact, the two bacteria that provide nutrients for the sharpshooter themselves have complementary genomes, each having lost formerly essential sections of their genome now found in the other. The bacteria not only produce nutrients for the host, but also depend on each other’s presence to get the nutrients they themselves need.

Most biologists now believe that complex cells with nuclei—eukaryotes—originated from simpler cells by combining and integrating the functions of those cells. A eukaryotic cell’s mitochondria, which convert food to more readily usable energy sources, or a eukarotyic cell’s chloroplasts, responsible for photosynthesis, are both believed to derive from what once were separate and distinct organisms. Similarly, the bacteria in leafhoppers have become essential for the leafhoppers’ survival, reproducing along with the insects themselves.

Perhaps not surprisingly, mutualistic relationships between bacteria and host organisms aren’t limited to insects. The biochemist who blogs as “Lab Rat” points to another such relationship, which allows plants to use otherwise inaccessible nitrogen in the atmosphere. While the importance of the relationship between plants and the bacteria in root nodules has been recognized for years, recent advances in genome sequencing have helped shed light on how the relationship may have evolved. Lab Rat cites a review published last month by Christina Toft and Siv Andersson in Nature Reviews Genetics. Toft and Andersson say that as a mutualistic relationship becomes more advanced, genomes in mutualistic bacteria become progressively smaller.

In the early stages of a mutualistic relationship, a bacterium must be able to survive on its own in addition to within a host organism. In fact, its genome might become more complex as it develops the means to interact successfully with its host. But once the bacterium is completely dependent on its host, the genes and apparatus that allowed it live independently become unwieldy vestigial baggage. The research on genome size in these bacteria backs this up: Bacteria that are fully dependent on their hosts have significantly smaller genomes than those that are also able to live on their own.

After nearly a billion years of evolution, the mitochondria in your cells bear small resemblance to their bacterial ancestors, but they still possess their own DNA and the ability to reproduce. Their tiny genome contains just enough information to preserve their function, independent of the vastly larger genome of your cell nucleus. Without the protection of your body and the food delivered by your digestive and circulatory systems, your mitochondria couldn’t survive. But without mitochondria, all eukaryotic life as we know it, let alone plants and animals, would be impossible. While it’s impossible to reconstruct the evolution of mitochondria with certainty, other mutualistic bacteria can give us insight into how mitochondria may have evolved.

And while it seems unlikely that humans will ever develop the ability to survive on syrup alone, insects that thrive on an equally simple diet can still show us something about how human life evolved, with all its diverse tastes and needs.

Dave Munger is editor of ResearchBlogging.org, where you can find thousands of blog posts on this and myriad other topics. Each week, he writes about recent posts on peer-reviewed research from across the blogosphere. See previous Research Blogging columns »